This article in Popular Mechanics raises the possibility that Boeing might fund a renewed search for the missing Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER that was operating MH370 when it vanished on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014.

The suggestion is made by John Goglia, a safety consultant and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board (the equivalent of Australia’s ATSB), which is what makes it newsworthy.

Mr Goglia is a respected, and eminently well connected voice in matters of air safety, although it is not known if Boeing is considering such a step at this moment, or is inclined to do so in the near future, if it has one should a trade war between the US and the rest of the world wipe out most of its commercial airplane business after President elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.

There are so many variables at play in attempting to predict the exact path taken by MH370 before it crashed into the south Indian Ocean that the jet might only be stumbled upon so far into the future that no-one who knew any of the 239 people who were onboard the flight will be alive.

The world’s greatest aviation mystery may have long been consigned to footnote status by more recent incidents involving spaceliners plying the routes to orbital factories, or bases on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system.

Such a fate befell the approximately 1820 shipwreck (top of page) that was located during the course of the search for MH370 in 2015. All of the wooden structure of that shipwreck, about which almost nothing is known today, has long vanished, leaving only partly corroded metal objects, such as a trunk, a ship’s wheel, and the nails which held the decking, masts and keel together, scattered on the ocean floor.

Those processes of decay will also obliterate MH370 in the centuries to come, should the wreckage not be found when it is recogniseable, useful, and yet important to those the 239 souls on board left behind on March 8, 2014.

Updated* Boeing says that Mr Goglia has clarified that his reference to “work” to find MH370 should not have been interpreted as the “search” should continue under private funding.